Menotonal; tedious but necessary

Yes it's another techy-geeky-post... but hey, it's like finances and ironing; yukky but has to be faced.

Last week things were not running smoothly with dear old Voovoo the Vaio. Then, after I couldn't get a vid to run over at the Pug Ranch, their mum dropped the hint that perhaps it was time to clear cookies...

Oh the irony. I'm usually the one reminding everyone else! But as mentioned in last Friday's menoloopal, it was not the best of weeks.

Anyhoo, that butt-kick made me realise that I had done no backups or any kind of system maintenance since I had returned from OZ - and indeed before I went to OZ, when it was really due. Normally I spend one day a month going through all the necessaries for optimising Voo's health.

What sort of thing? Microsoft Essentials is my daily scanner for any nasties, on quick mode, then once a week I run the full scan. There is also a weekly sweep with MalwareBytes (just the little free version - I tried loading the optimum version as they had a try-before-buy period - but after a week of that I was tearing my hair out, as it caused more problems than it solved; far too 'bossy' - I stopped using Norton and then Trend Micro for the same reasons). I do a disk cleanup fortnightly and a defragmentation every second month. There is also a regular back up to pen drive of all personal files and to another pen drive of relevant software - the first is done weekly and the latter quarterly.

At least that was the case until OZ interrupted! Set myself to doing all that last week and catching up to schedule again.

During this, I usually check through what updates have downloaded... I had noticed a drag on the net again... remember this article? Well...! (sighs) Having successfully routed all the offending Win10 stuff and put a block on downloads of the spy files, I found that my instructions had been over-riden by the jackboots of Redmond! The dreaded KB3035583 file had reappeared - and sure enough, so did that b***** bully-box for W10.

I promptly ripped it out and all other updates since the start of the year and shut off automatic updates altogether. In the age of the www it would be naive to think that one can have total control over one's private computer, there are far too many encrypted algorithms out there now. The genie is well uncorked on that one. However, I do expect to be able to say what files and software I want on my machine, to be given appropriate choice and to not be ordered around like a numskull...

It is not just that there is so much 'spyware' in legitimate proprietory software now (...and you 'Fruity Users', don't think you are immune...); it is the underhanded, slinkeroony way that files are manipulated which stinks. There have been moves for Win 10 to now enter your systems, regardless. (Oh, and just as a little BTW... if you are someone who is suckered onto using Internet Explorer as your search engine of choice... you may need to be aware of this.)

A further, somewhat disturbing, turn in events of the W10 kind is that Microbully is now getting hardware manufacturers - in particular for CPU and chips - to optimise or work only with their new platform. That means that any new equipment bought from later this year will ONLY run with W10 - no back track to Win7 possible.

Definitely time to start swotting up on Linux Mint (father has swapped to it and is quite enjoying the experience). Am not making any sudden moves, but definitely worth investigating.

Take a deep breath. I'm done. For now.